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Monday, January 29, 2018

I am old enough to be a little concerned when my new haircut makes me look like an aging Ulrike Meinhof, to remember the fear of a global war when Russia entered Afghanistan, and to have drawn a sigh of relief with the relaxation of the cold fronts between the nuclear powers. But in all of this time the US was a place of continuous progress. It might not always have been a progress I was comfortable with or agreed on - I have always avoided American style fast-food joints when possible - but I thought of it as a nation at least trying to make life better for others.

Then came the election of Bush in 2000. I was in the States at the time, a visiting scholar at the NYU, and heard the professors speak about the voter failures, particularly in the black neighbourhoods, where whole sacks of registration forms were lost. Later came professor Johan Galtung's assessment of the American society. Now, umair haque's article on the American Collapse.

I thought my belief in the US had fallen with the Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe's book "We who loved America" (in Norwegian), a collection of essays on American war crimes and the prosecution of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, but it hasn't been until the last few years that I realised I still thought of the US as a nation where the society tried to make life better for all who lived there. A progress at least vaguely aimed at the good of human kind.

I still love my US friends - now perhaps more than ever, as so many of them think, breathe, speak and act on a resistance to the collapse - but my optimism on behalf of the system has been lost. I am now reaching for Galtung to understand what is going on. And listening to a younger generation, who have walked into the world we made for them with their eyes open.

Friday, January 05, 2018

It's been a while. I know I was going to blog more in 2017, but somewhere in Bangkok that disappeared from my agenda, and I started being very, very present in the here and now. That is good, you know, all that mindfulness and paying attention kind of thing, but also bad, because my here and now is rarely as interesting as my over there and then.

Case in point. My current here and now finds me fighting dust. I am having the kitchen and hallway redone, and it's going to be fabulous. But right now it means I am walking on temporary boards, through clouds of dust, to get to the bathroom. I have no kitchen - it is a dark hole from a post-apocalyptic fantasy. It doesn't help that I am currently reading the Newsflesh series by Mira Grant. I am expecting the zombies of the world to lurk under the lacking floor boards, and there I am with nothing but a plastic dust-door between me and a new life as carnivore.

But it is Mira Grant who inspired me to write my blog again. Her zombie apocalypse comes with government conspiracies, transgender make-up artists, and, above all else, bloggers. The way she thinks about blogging is how I thought about it ten years ago: with an upbeat optimism, some naiveté and a deep love of a functioning, quick and open internet. This is a world where the government may be experimenting with viruses that leaves your undead even more dead than expected, but it is also a world where Net Neutrality is going strong, and the hackers are our heros. They do get bitten first though, once they leave their safe space in front of the monitor, so they aren't the main heroes.

Anyway.

2017 was a year of movement and change. I visited four countries besides Norway and Denmark, which isn't all that much for me, but I spent half a year abroad, in different locations. This brought with it new routines, new experiences, new fun and new frustrations.

I learned to love Bologna more than ever. Italy is one of my favourite countries in the world, and after three months of winter/spring in Bologna, I am now homesick for it. I want to walk its street, eat the food, listen to the voices, read in the libraries and people-watch for ever.

The next shock to my system was Bangkok. I did not stay for long enough for Thailand to become familiar, as this was just a quick visit, but it left a deep impression. This was such a different way to live, and still so wonderfully vibrant and interesting, that it will always be there as a temptation to explore with (a lot) more time and preferably somewhat lower temperatures.

Melbourne however was perhaps the most difficult experience. I thought I was familiar with Australia, but I have just touched lightly on the surfaces and not been experiencing it. And this version of Australia was winter, cold, influenza and a grey, windy city. So, kind of like Copenhagen, but without the bikes. I left just as it was about to enter into spring, and I have to admit, at this point the only aspects that I miss from Melbourne are the people. My wonderful RMIT host Emma Witkowski is a colleague I love to work with, hang out with and spar with, and I miss her. My hosts and the designers of the game that was the subject of my doctorate thesis, Dragon Realms, and their children, are friends I miss on a regular basis. And I made new friends there, wonderful and warm friendships with people I would love to have in my life every day. They made it worth while to deal with being cold all the time, every day. I don't even dress that warmly now, in January in Denmark, as I did to keep warm there. Australia does have more than Melbourne going for it though. I just went north to the sun and the beaches, and suddenly I remembered why I love the continent in the first place. Editing at the side of a pool, with occasional breaks to swim, is not the worst thing. I could do without the giant cockroaches though.

All of this has lead to two articles and a book. The articles are one done, one in review (and in need of being expanded). The book is 2/3rds ready and will be done before spring. (I hope.) It has also lead to new and renewed contacts, to new ideas and new ambitions, and a rethinking and affirmation of my scholarship. But most of all: I am no longer a zombie.

In 2016 I had a very small piece of surgery with huge consequences. If you are curious, google hyperparathyroidism, and read about the symptoms. I was a living walking braindead, with enough awareness to be terrified of what was happening to me. Now I am awake, alert, alive, and looking forwards to more exploration and new adventures! As long as the zombies don't rise from my ripped-open kitchen floor.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Once in a while we argue on the Internet, and then afterwards we realise why that other person was so annoying. I am not going to give you the exact link here, but just offer a general example, because this is a common come-back that claims your argument is flawed - while the come-back is even more so.

The "It's anecdotal evidence" argument, #1

In a discussion concerning the borderland of identity politics and nationalism - so not a happy place to discuss to begin with, I used eyewitness reports of bad behaviour to support my argument. This was immediately rejected, as it was anecdotal evidence, and the person rejecting it had seen with his own eyes that it did not happen. Sometimes, these discussions are best to walk away from, so I did, but the lack of logic in the response bothered me, so here we are. What was wrong with this situation?

1: I had eyewitness reports of something happening.
2: When reported to others, these were now hearsay, which meant they lost impact.
3: My claim was that these things occasionally happened.
4: The other person had seen more than one situation where these things did not happen.
5: The other person used this to claim that these things never happened.

If I had been acting as a researcher, I would have had proof of the eyewitness reports to offer an ethics committee, but I didn't, so it was still hearsay. I also didn't want to link to the blogs of friends who had experienced this behaviour, so there went that possibility. Why not? Well, this was the internet, and we all know how incredibly horrible people can be online. I'll rather swallow my pride than bring the hater hordes down on friends. This means that I can't really play the fact-card here. The question is, can the person I am arguing against do so?

If we look at the claims, the other party has a much heavier burden of proof to carry than I did. Where I claimed that they occasionally happened, where one or two observations or experiences would be enough, the other person claimed this never happened. They used a hasty generalisation:

Hasty Generalization: This is a conclusion based on insufficient or biased evidence. In other words, you are rushing to a conclusion before you have all the relevant facts. Example:

Even though it's only the first day, I can tell this is going to be a boring course.

In this example, the author is basing his evaluation of the entire course on only the first day, which is notoriously boring and full of housekeeping tasks for most courses. To make a fair and reasonable evaluation the author must attend not one but several classes, and possibly even examine the textbook, talk to the professor, or talk to others who have previously finished the course in order to have sufficient evidence to base a conclusion on.

The original topic was something which is impossible to prove from your own experience. Even if you did a thorough research project on it, had observers in every nook and cranny of the country, and asked the entire Norwegian population, report errors, method weaknesses and sheer time and space would work against you. Proving that something has never happened is impossible. The other person could say "This never happens where I am", and that I'd be happy to believe. It still won't disprove the possibility that it could have happened somewhere else.

So what are we left with? This is the Internet, so some methodological wobbling is to be expected. But the kind of keyboard warriors that aim at winning arguments through superior logic don't always have the firmest of grasps. And next time somebody rejects my hearsay, I'll hopefully be able to politely point out that they can doubt my claim, but they can't disprove it.

And yes, this made me feel better, which is what hindsight is all about. Arguing on the Internet is after all good practice in the study of fallacies. And if somebody for some reason recognises the discussion, I am going to admit that my original post was aiming for a slippery slope fallacy - if they mean A, let's just hope they are as aggressive in this thinking when they see B happen.

Slippery Slope: This is a conclusion based on the premise that if A happens, then eventually through a series of small steps, through B, C,..., X, Y, Z will happen, too, basically equating A and Z. So, if we don't want Z to occur, A must not be allowed to occur either. Example:

If we ban Hummers because they are bad for the environment eventually the government will ban all cars, so we should not ban Hummers.

In this example, the author is equating banning Hummers with banning all cars, which is not the same thing.

I stopped at B though, but yeah, it could have ended with banning all cars if I hadn't gotten siderailed by being annoyed at discussion logic. But then, as is the nature of the 'net, the original discussion was a slippery slope as well. If they take this freedom from us, any moment now we will all be brainwashed...

Monday, November 27, 2017

The #metoo campaign took off, and now certain men worry about whether or not they can approach women without having their intentions misunderstood. They fear just being a man will victimize them, and worry about the skewed balance of society, now that women have retaliated against some of the more powerful abusers.

I feel for them. I really do. It is never fun to know that your gender will make others take advantage of you. Women know that feeling very well, and I sympathize with all who are now afraid that their good intentions will be misunderstood. If you invite a friend in for coffee, for instance, and suddenly this friend thinks you were inviting them in for sex, and you say no, but they say yes, and there you go, non-consensual sex happens. Also known, frequently, as date-rape, and something the perpetrator statistically gets away with, because if you invite somebody in for coffee, everybody knows that means sex. Or rather, if you need it spelled out: The person knew that society would trust them if they said they misunderstood your intentions, but not trust you. The person then used this knowledge of how society would interpret the situation to their advantage if you accused them of rape later on, and accused you, the victim, of sending mixed signals, or being a tease, or not being clear enough. It is awful. Nobody likes it.

Or, perhaps you are walking home in the evening, after a fun night with your friends, and you wanted to make an impression on a special someone, so you dressed a bit more enticing than you normally do. But if you dress for one person, it means you invite everybody, so when you are approached and dragged off into the back of a car and raped, the fact that you're a woman wearing a short skirt and high heels is misunderstood for a woman who wants to be sexually abused by random people passing by, and so it's ok to ask about what you were wearing that night and if the clothes could have caused a random stranger to believe you wanted to have sex with them.

Or you give a guy a hug after the company dinner, and he thinks you want to sleep with him, so he starts groping and kissing, and you just wanted to hug because you liked him, and now you really don't like him any more! Yes, Jan Guillou, it's tough to just want to give another person a hug, and be misunderstood. And now some guys start to understand that gender makes a difference for how you are perceived. It's what those pesky, bitchy, whiny, angry, aggressive (hey, misunderstood and bedeviled because of gender much) feminists have been trying to say for a very long time. Gender matters.

And no, being an older man is not the worst thing you can be. But being a powerful, established man who uses his power to take advantage of men and women who need his approval and then abuse them sexually? That is a pretty disgusting thing to be, and you really shouldn't try to defend them just to be allowed to hug one or two pretty young girls after the Christmas party. Keep your hands lightly on their shoulders, don't push your tongue down their throats and don't grind your hips into theirs, and you should be perfectly fine. It's all we ask, really. Shouldn't be that hard. It helps if you hug the older, ugly female colleagues, and your male colleagues, and the transgender ones, too. It demonstrates that you are just happy and friendly and want to let the world know it.

Personally, like I have done since I was old enough to get the rules, I will dress modestly, not drink too much, avoid flirting with men I am not sure can understand a no, and go home while thinking about how to stay safe. I do that regularly in order to not have to accuse some older man of sexual misconduct in social settings. I have tried to avoid that for years. You're welcome.

Being paranoid about past sexual actions or habits should only be used as a way to ensure you do not make the same mistakes in the future. Do not use it as a way to turn yourselves into victims because you have a notion of women as manipulative people who just decided if something was or wasn’t assault on a whim. Flirt with people who are into you, and take no for an answer. Life is not a movie and kissing someone out of nowhere for dramatic tension is not something that happens. Don’t masturbate in front of women. Don’t ask out people who work for you. If you can’t hold your liquor, don’t go drinking with co-workers. If a woman isn’t responding to you in any way just move on.

Friday, September 29, 2017

Mina Ghabel Lunde, a knowledgeable and angry woman, is writing about the trend (in Norwegian) to permit very young girls to wear a hijab in schools in Norway, and the acceptance of this practice. I am really happy she does, even if I am one of the women she is attacking. I am one of those who don't think there should be a separate girls' lego, but that the traditional designs should have more colours - including pink - and more designs, not to mention more girl options in the existing designs.

This is, compared to the issue of tiny girls being considered sexualised individuals, who men can not look at without being tempted to sin, a pretty innocent problem. It might look like a problem for those who have no real problems. That doesn't mean I have never thought about the fact that young girls wear hijabs.

The hijab is a hypersexualising piece of clothing. This may sound weird, as it is not revealing, like a bikini or a cropped shorts leaving half a tiny butt hanging out, but its purpose is to point out that the person wearing it is a woman, a sexual being, a temptress who can unmake men's resolve if they get but a glimpse of her body. It holds immense promise, even more than the revealed body, because it states a power so strong that it needs to be controlled severely, or it will unmake the men who face its raw nakedness. If you can see the least lock of hair, men can lose their minds, the hijab claims.

So why have I not written about it before? It's not like I haven't thought it. Lovely, modern-dressed mothers with their tiny daughters, in matching hijabs and sparkling nails. Large, covered and veiled women with young girls I can only guess the age of through their size. And to address the fact that the need to cover their bodies keeps these girls from learning to swim: families on the beaches around Copenhagen, the women veiled in the shadow, preparing picnics and looking after the little ones, while the men lounge in shorts or jump in the water. Oh yes, I can see them.

But faced with this, I also have to face my lack of knowledge about the better options. What can I offer a girl in a veil? If I complain about her being on the beach without swimming, I may not help her remove the veil, I may take away from her the right to be on the beach. If I question the wisdom of putting a hijab on a 10-year old, I may not help her to feel the wind in her hair, but take away her opportunity to walk freely with her mother on the street. When I complain about the extreme pinkness of girl clothing, I know there are other and better options available, which will not restrict the girls further. I know the consequences of having a wider colour range available for girls and boys, and it is not isolation, restriction and alienation. I don't know the consequence for the girl in the hijab.

That is why it is so important that women who do know the consequences, who know the communities, the families, the cultures and the rules, speak up for their sisters, and help us, who would like to speak but who fear to do it wrong, to learn how we can speak of this correctly and not restrictively. So thank you, Mina Ghabel Lunde, for speaking up and pointing out the problem. I will still speak up when I think Lego behaves stupidly. I will not start speaking against little girls in hijabs, because I still fear I will say something stupid, and make things worse. But I am very happy to help signal boost your arguments, and look for ways to help, because yes, I do think it is a problem to sexualise little girls and little boys, no matter how it happens. Let them just be children, with all the options open, for a while yet.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

This isn't a metaphor for how knowledge accumulates like sand to create the volume of knowledge which we can traverse - although that might actually have worked. Instead it is about real beaches and the process of writing.

First time I heard about the idea of writing on a beach was way back in the late eighties, as my fellow student told me she had written her master's thesis on the beach. I was green with envy, but also quite incredulous. It was a great thesis, but I didn't believe in the kind of work that could be done without a huge stack of books, a hard chair and the musty air of a library or reading-room.

Then I started to have to get academic work done, no matter what. I spent a too-hot week in New York not in the city, but in lovely Greenport, because there was a cheap hotel by a pebbly little beach on the North Shore, just the place to be while the city was melting.

That worked, so when I had a chance to go to Italy for some weeks, I brought the computer to Urbino and ultimately to Pesaro, which has a spectacular beach. I won't recommend trying to work there in the season though, it's crowded and hot and noisy - but in September October it's quiet and lovely.

Then follows a list of beautiful Italian experiences. Alghero, with or without beach, is definitely a place where it is possible to work, but Bosa became a special place. The lovely town with its spectacular beach was where I went with two colleagues for the first serious academic bootcamp - a concentrated period of lovely surroundings, great food and intense work.

In between this I moved to Denmark, and for a while had an office which was unbearably hot during the hours with direct summer sunlight. Since that's not all that common (perhaps 5-6 days a year), it was acceptable to work elsewhere during those hours, and I started taking my work to the nearby beach. I read, reviewed and commented on endless papers, articles, exams, books, during those beach hours. There is a certain amount of guilt to it, I guess. If I am to have such a lovely time, I had rather work, to prove that I am not just there on vacation. Daughter of a deeply protestant work-ethic as I am, having a too good time is not good at all, but if I can be productive, it makes up for it.

This has brought me to where I am today. I am currently on sabbatical in Australia, visiting at the RMIT. However, they have winter here at the moment. (Insert Scandinavian rant about insulation, architecture, windows and temperatures indoors.) While I love my friends in Melbourne, the city has some of the best food to be found anywhere (gluten free dumplings, and spectacular ones!) and RMIT is a very interesting University, winter in Melbourne is a definite meh. After 10 days were lost to the flu, and I spent most of my working days wrapped up for below zero when it was around +10, and still freezing, I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself, and go north to find some warmth. And here I am:

I even took a picture of the work I am doing, just to prove that I do work, but it was showing too much of the text of a fellow researcher for random publication. in the three days I have been here I have finished reading and graded two 100+ page final dissertations, finished up editing an article after review, send off another article for peer review, and reviewed the work of said colleague. All this while listening to the surf, and applying sunscreen. And in between writing this blog post, I have been working to administrate the reviewing of a journal issue. Guilt. It's a powerful thing, and right now I feel guilty for not sticking with the winter. But I guess I will get enough of that when I return to Denmark in October.

Friday, August 18, 2017

Some days ago we learned that the Norwegian minister of knowledge (education, I guess) delivered what he thought was a funny joke about white power. He immediately after had to do what it took Pewdiepie months to do - renounce stupid nazi jokes. Which proves that if nothing else, he is quicker in the uptake than at least one well-paid streaming star. The apology is however not going over well with - why am I not surprised - white men with some education. They claim it is another example of the supression of free speech. (And I am not directly quoting here because no way am I pointing the shamers and trolls of the world at individuals who are not elected officials or Youtube millioneers.) (If you don't think you said anything like that, I am not talking about you.)

Anyway - I suspect the problem with not acknowledging the danger of these casual jokes and what they symbolise isn't that Norwegian educated men any moment now will be donning the SS-shirts hanging in their closets. (Note: I do not believe all white educated men are secret nazi's. Was this a bad joke? Perhaps, if so I apologize. Irony is hard. It's based on stating what we all know is impossible or unreasonable. It stops working if the other party doesn't know what you said is impossible.) Our lack of acceptance that "race" is important is rather the opposite of the problem with America: where they reject the existence of class, we reject the possibility of ethnicity and race as dividers of the population.

Scandinavian social democracy, whether we have a red, green, blue or darkblue government, has a set of basic ideals, and one of those is the value of honest work. There is no shame in what your work is, as long as you work. Of course, like with all ideals, this isn't perfect. There is still a shadow of class arrogance between neighbourhoods. There is a center/periphery divide with a definite class flavour to it. Classic markers like language, taste in music, reading habits, artistic ability, education, etc etc - they still influence us. They make it easier to get jobs, gain influence, find the right kind of friends. We are however aware of them, know how to navigate the class issue and how to either counter or take advantage of it in different situations. Through the acknowledgement of the existence of a class-based society, we can work on making the effects of it less obvious and painful.

Gender is also getting there, although it takes a bit longer. This is among other things because the fight for class equality for a long time overshadowed the issue of gender equality. I apologize for not translating the following quote, but it is mainly here to demonstrate that I am not taking the socialist movement resistance to gender equality from my own imagination:

So, yeah, minimising class difference is better explored and the tools better developed than for minimising gender difference. On this background, it makes sense that we still have difficulties dealing with a more ethnically diverse society. After all, while the first labour movements started to bloom, and the first socialists started to talk about votes for all, we still had a paragraph in our constitution that denied jews access to the country. It was removed in 1851, and one of the most active builders of the image of Norway, the poet Henrik Wergeland, was a vital agent in opposing it, so we got on with it reasonably quickly, but it wasn't at the top of our agenda.

The tragedies that followed in the second world war, and the time it took for Norwegians to understand what was really happening, not even the heroics of the border guides and shetland boats could totally wipe away. Norway's past, when it comes to ethnic diversity, is blotted with attempts to eradicate the culture and language of the Sami and the Norwegian travellers, "taterne". But it is coming together, slowly, as the basic value of equality means that there is a positive trend in Norwegian society. Lately, however, the societal changes have just been too rapid for this slow assimilation. And so it is hard to understand why a bunch of white men can't, in a private party, joke about "white power", if black men can use racial epithets about themselves.

The difference is: the white power groups were very busy eradicating all the others, and not enough time has passed to let the ideology pass into history. While armed protesters still march to insist on white supremacy, racist jokes are bad. Perhaps wait a few generations after the last nazi is gone before you start, like with the white knights. If it is hard to understand, think about Isis. I suspect it would be time for some apologies if a muslim politician joked about fighting for Isis in a private party, that is, if the terror police didn't get him first. And that is not even a joke. A muslim politician being overheard as speaking in favour of Isis could end really badly, no matter how funny he thought his ironic comment was.

That is my point though: we haven't learned how to be a multicultural society yet. We want to be, and we want to not feel guilty when we do the wrong things, and we want to be funny when we crack jokes, and we want everybody to understand that we are working hard on being a society with strong values on the side of democracy and equality. But we have to give ourselves time to learn. Learning is painful, not only for the teacher, but also for the student, and right now, we Scandinavians are students of how to live in a heterogenous society. We will do stupid things. We should apologize. We should rethink. And then do smarter and more universally funny things. Because a joke only you like isn't really a joke worth retelling. Let's all aim for better jokes all around.

Monday, August 14, 2017

One of the arguments that keep popping up in Twitter and Facebook feeds is a discussion around free speech, and how the feminist agenda is limiting it. Of course, occasionally other agendas are killing free speech, such as those who fight for ethnic equality, economic equality or just plain human rights. With the claim that the feminist (or other equality based) agenda is accused of limiting free speech, there tends to be one think they all have in common. The threatened speech can be seen as supporting discrimination.

I want to talk about the idea that all free speech should be without consequence. Because that is what is argued in the case of the Google engineer. He has, after all, not been refused his right to speak, quite the opposite, he has been asked to speak quite a lot since he was fired. What he wants is to speak without any negative consequences to himself. When he then claims it is a free speech matter, he commits a logical fallacy. Dissent of a woman made a pretty good list of logical fallacies concerning free speech back in 2012, long before this, and at least one is directly relevant:

4) An edict that states that an employer, school or club cannot form or enforce policies on speech that happens within its own environment and boundaries.

Citizen G: You’re a stupid bitch!

The boss: You’re fired.

Citizen G (to the lawyer he or she hopes to hire): That stupid bitch violated my right to free speech.

Clarifying the fallacy: The lawyer will not be taking Citizen G’s case because employee discipline is not legal censorship. Citizen G’s right to curse about his or her boss is protected, but will not receive safeguards from anything except arrest or government assassination. Firing Citizen G did not nullify his or her ability to call his or her boss a stupid bitch.

Google is huge, and if Google really does practice censorship of free speech, we'd be in trouble. I would probably be in trouble personally, since Google owns this blog platform. Now there are ways in which Google regulates speech, and while I don't think it's with malicious intent, it's really annoying to borderline problematic. For instance: if you're a scholar and use Google scholar, you really should make sure to do your searches while you are abroad on conferences as well as from home. The algorithm that makes sure that your search for "same day car repairs", or "pizza takeaway" gives you the local hits high up on your list, apparently messes with Google scholar hits. After a year of travels and writing from different countries, it has become pretty obvious - articles which are not frequently used in local searches and libraries come far down the list. This kind of censorship causes a bias in academic writing and publishing which makes it almost impossible for dissenting voices from remote locations to be heard, as it strengthens the centrally positioned scholars' tendency to only cite each other, making it less and less likely that others will be heard.

But even this isn't a violation of free speech. That would be if Google stopped displaying hits outside of our geographic area, suppressing them in specific searches, and is exactly the kind of censorship that comes into play in the Google vs China discussion:

Google vs. China

Google has had a rocky relationship with the Chinese authorities since January 2010, when the company said it might shut down Chinese operations due to a "sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack. Google said at the time that it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine. The forced blockage of Google's service and Google's subsequent threat to pull out highlight concerns of cyberspace security within China. While Jiang Yu, a spokesperson of the China's Foreign Ministry, promoted the Chinese government's "development of the internet", Wang Chen of China's State Council Information Office defended online censorship: "Maintaining the safe operation of the Internet and the secure flow of information is a fundamental requirement for guaranteeing state security and people's fundamental interests, promoting economic development and cultural prosperity and maintaining a harmonious and stable society."[56] In 2014, in response to a series of terrorist attacks, China made all Google services almost unusable by tightening its Internet censorship, often called the "Great Firewall of China". In 2009, one-third of all searches in China were on Google. As of 2013 the US company has only 1.7% market share.

Now, this is actual censorship in action, and this is a threat to free speech. What we are looking at here is how Google controls what I guess we can all agree is an asset to freedom of speech, and they refuse to adjust it to facilitate the kind of censorship practiced in mainland China.

But why fight for the right of women, coloured or low-income individuals to speak, and not the right of all, specifically educated, well situated white men? Aren't they allowed to start discussions about their working conditions?

Of course they are. But here's the thing with freedom of speech - for it to work, we all need to agree that all are equal first. Otherwise it won't be free speech, it will be a mutual silencing attempt. And this is where supremacy-groups come in. Whether it's gender supremacy (all directions), ethnic, colour, educational, or based on weight or muscle strength, supremacy groups that try to silence others because they for some reason "do not fit" have already waived their right to free speech. If you claim that being somehow "better" gives you the right to shut others up, you have to accept that others, who might be "better" than you, have the right to shut you up. And since in cases like this right = might, we are not looking at a society with free speech any more, and you can't use the argument. This is also where I have a problem with some of the more extreme aspects of identity politics - silencing the opposition is never OK. However, most advocates of identity politics don't try to silence the opposition. They just want them to be polite.

So, what does this have to do with the poor engineer, who just wanted the right to not having to be so sensitive all the time? Well, he has the right to be insensitive. However, he can't force others to like him for it. Or to return to the list of things free speech is not at Dissent of a woman:

1) A guarantee that in any particular interaction between individuals, people will like you, respect your opinion or even listen to you.

Illustrative dramatization:Citizen A: We shouldn’t be arguing about gender equality and pay when women don’t belong in the workforce in the first place. Working women are ruining families everywhere.Citizen B: Citizen A, you are an idiot and I do not deem your supposition as worthy of a response.Citizen C: I agree with Citizen B.Citizen D: What the fuck, Citizen A? I want no piece of this protosexist fundamentalist nightmare. Take that shit elsewhere.Citizen A: I have the right to express my opinion without all you fascists ganging up on me and trying to shut me up. Freedom of speech, bitches.

Clarifying the fallacy: Actually, Citizens B-D have the right to call Citizen A names, as well as contradict and devalue Citizen A’s stupid opinion for the exact same reason that Citizen A is free to express a stupid opinion. Both the stupid opinion and the entirely appropriate return volley of criticism are protected by the first amendment.

I sympathize with the people who are angry that they can't speak their minds and still be popular for it, I really do. But getting feedback to what we say is how we learn.

And that engineer? He is now planning to sue Google, although it's not really yet clear on which grounds. (Also, he doesn't have a Ph. D., Businessinsider, even if his linkedin page said so for a while.) If he wins, it will probably be seen as a victory for people everywhere to speak up against company regulations. And in some cases, such as with particularly stupid dress codes, perhaps that's a good thing.

Thursday, August 10, 2017

We live in the future. Not only the actual future if seen from yesterday, but in the future of dreams. We can travel around the world in a matter of hours, rather than months, we can speak across vast distances, wirelessly on our personal phones, we have huge amounts of knowledge available at our fingertips on small easily carried devices, and we can carry all our books in a purse. (And that last link is to the Spanish Wikipedia, which I hope gives justice to the then 54 year old inventor of the first electronic book, a Spanish schoolteacher named Ángela Ruiz Robles.)

But has this change actually been that huge? When I was a kid, I used to think about the changes my parents and grandparents saw. My grandfather on my father's side was a sami farmer in a world that went from horses and sail to cars and motor boats. My grandfather on my mother's side was an itinerant worker, a mason, who built railroads and bridges, cutting and working stone by hand and careful use of dynamite. Both my parents experienced farming with a horse and farming with a tractor, they would grow their own food, forage, hunt and fish as easily - or more - as they read the newspaper. The technology they adopted seems simple to us, but to them it was lifechanging - they got washing machines, chainsaws, television. In their lifetimes travel became a mundane thing, to the point that when their daughters grew up jumping on a train to go through Europe was not only doable, but popular.

And then the digital age hit us.

Was this when the future arrived?

Personally, I don't think so. We are just skimming the cream of all those firsts that are so much older than us. Before this blog comes the printing press, the type-writer, the moving image, the screen, the radio, the telephone, wired and wireless transmission, the Colossus computer, all inventions from the lifetime of both my grandparents and parents. What I use is all of this, put together, and used in different manners. Our inventions are bricolages, mixtures of what was already there.

The one, drastically new thing, that permits this culture of remixing the past, is the micro chip. Those who were at a "folk college" at Skjeberg in 1980-81, may remember a more than usually confused radio segment about the micro chip and how it would revolutionize the future. We knew it would happen, but at the time we had no idea how, and we particularly had no idea that what we tried to talk about was actually called an integrated circuit, had been developed since the fifties, and would thoroughly revolutionize the way we communicated.

Something as simple as remix culture isn't new, but remixing wouldn't want to be. Because what would Duchamp's L. H. O. O. Q be without art history? Remixing is possible and has meaning because of the past, not in spite of it. And in the spirit, and hopefully with the sense of humour of Duchamp, I find it fascinating and delightful that the most revolutionary invention of this age quite possibly is a better way to utilize what is already there.

Monday, August 07, 2017

Wonderful fellow researcher Lone writes about how she does bring her phone with her on vacation, and she argues well for why, as she describes the phone as a vital part of how she experiences and shares her life. At the same time current media are packed with warnings and "social media diets". The article that triggered this blog post is from yesterday's Daily Mail, but if you google the term, you'll see that this pops up every year, in different media. It is clearly one of those topics, that like bikini bodies and barbeque accidents return regularly to our attention. So let's look at it a bit.

First, the issue of "social media diets" tend to pop up when parents have to spend time with their kids, and discover what they are actually doing. In this case, it's summer, they go on vacation, the phones may not be as easily charged or the roaming costs go through the roof, and not only do the kids rebel, but the parents can't use their own phones as a distraction, and so it's clear that there has been a change of behaviour. Social media have become extremely important in our lives, from an early age on.

Lone Koefoed Hansen connects to the tradition of the cyborg body, envisioned among other places in Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, where she describes humanity as a hybrid between flesh and machine. The machine, in this understanding, is not a monstrous alienating force, but an extension of our bodies. As long as this extension is relatively simple and recognisable, perhaps even traditional, an axe, for instance, or a needle, we don't really question whether it ruins society as we know it. It is when this extension becomes unfamiliar that we, as a society, question its value. Do we really need to be able to fly, or will it end horribly if we try? Are souls captured by photography? Is a sun-centric model of the universe heretic? Can women play games? Change is always scary, and change in how our children act, think, speak, and in the choices they make, is perhaps the scariest of all. Hence, the reassuring, calming, idea of the healthy and controlled media diet.

Most media diets offer time restrictions. I am rather in favour of those. Kids need to do a variety of things - run, climb, be cold and warm, fall down and get back up, be stung by a wasp and get wet in a puddle - they need all of the experiences, and they need to do quite a few of them on their own, outside. This takes time. Same does reading, drawing, playing an instrument, helping with cooking, having a conversation with a friend or an adult, doing chores and playing a board-game with the family. If kids are glued to the screens, they won't get any of this very important stuff done. However. And this is where I disagree with the strict restrictions. However, by making the social media time something which is not part of all the rest, they don't need to control it, use it and take advantage of it.

Social media today isn't something you do in isolation, it is part of everything. It's sending a snap to a friend when you're hanging upside down from a tree. It's asking when you can meet while you're stuck in your parents' car and really want to make sure you can see your friend that night. It's demonstrating your instrument skills to a proud grandma on Skype. It's the picture of the one successful cupcake, the joke shared among friends that makes you laugh while you should be doing homework, it's the reminder from your sister that you need to plan a present, it's the argument you got into that escalated when you used the wrong emoticon because you were walking to the bus while typing.

This can't be quantified. It has to be learned in order for our kids to understand the restrictions and the possibilities. And we are the ones who need to support that learning, just like we need to support our kids as they learn how to get to school, how to choose a boyfriend, how to drink responsibly, how to have safe sex, how to go for a hike, how to drive a car, how to travel the world. And, since we are talking of diets, yes, we also need to teach our kids how to eat healthy and well. And we know very well that this isn't only about quantity. Food is both good and bad for you. So are social media. Teach your kids to be sceptical, critical and a little cautious, just like they should be about modern, processed food. Because good use of social media is as hard as smart food choices. And it's can't all be cupcakes, even if they sometimes are just what you need.

Wednesday, May 03, 2017

My dreams are exceptionally mundane. They are silly funny things, like walking out the door of the apartment in Denmark and finding myself here in Bologna, or annoying, like fear of oversleeping making me wake up once an hour, if I have set the time early to make sure I manage to get up. But once upon a time I used to have nightmares.

They lasted well into my adult age, horrible terrors, where I was chased through a maze that was my childhood home, new doors opening in strange places, while the things chasing me - animals of some kind - came ever closer, until I woke up terrified, sometimes screaming.

The last time I had this dream, our little, orange kitten came into the dream. While I was trying to hide, she grew to the size of a lion, then she got between me and the thing chasing me, and ROARED.

This happened years ago, and the kitten became a cat, aged, and died, and we missed her and grieved for her. But in my dreams she still walks in her golden lion shape, and the dreams remain silly, funny, annoying or just weird. I never tried to interpret this at any particular level, I just accepted it, but it was a gift from a kitten that would have been put to sleep if we had not adopted her, a gift I treasure every time I don't bolt out of my dreams in terror.

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

When we moved to Denmark, my husband and I reduced our amount of property dramatically. Just the number of books we got rid of was overwhelming, and I still miss the almost new couch we left in Volda. One of these days I may go shopping for a new, equally comfortable one, because I am learning what comforts I really appreciate, and which are fleeting.

Another thing we wanted to leave behind was the need to constantly maintain our property. We had a large house and a difficult garden - although we let half of it return to nature - and we spent a lot more of our free time looking after all of this than we really wanted. So here I am, in a nice little city flat in Copenhagen. Two days of yard work a year, and everything else solved in the co-op, which is a common ownership structure here.

Everything, that is, except when something breaks inside the apartment. This year I have had to repair the electricity to the fridge and stove, the diswasher is broken, and lastly, the toilet is done for. I am learning about other comforts which are really important to me. My comfortable couch has suddenly moved far down on the must-have list, as I want, in falling order of importance: a toilet I can flush, a floor I am not worried about falling through, a finished book, a modern kitchen with enough power to actually use it, and a new couch. Note how the book I am devoting most of my time to has dropped on the list of priorities? Sorry, dear co-author, but being able to flush and walk across the floor takes precedence. The book will still get more action though, as that's the only thing I can actually do something about myself, without waiting for others.

At least the toilet in the sabbatical apartment in Bologna still works. Getting back there may be even nicer than I expected.

Tuesday, April 04, 2017

I am two months and one day into the sabbatical, and I have produced one article and almost two chapters. It's not a bad feat. The challenge is to keep going. I have to produce one more chapter draft, and then start massaging a large text into unity. The first part should be doable, I have almost 2 months to go for that. The second part will take months still.

There is however some kind of progress, even if it does not flow smoothly and confidently. And to celebrate that I want to share my most faithful companion with you. This little creature lives in the garden I see from my windows, comes out in the sun, and is one of life's great delights to spot it or one of its companions - because there are more than one. Here you go, the heraldic animal of the academic bootcamp.

Monday, March 20, 2017

They are the mainstay of research, the boring resource our students tend to forget about. Students keep asking me to help them find books and articles, I send them to the libraries, and they are always shocked. One student I worked particularly much with I met up in a library in order to show her how just sitting within their magical wireless aura boosts you access - at least if you are in a University Library in most of Europe with a Eduroam access, the way our students are.

In Copenhagen, I regularly use the large libraries in the city for my reading periods. Sitting in a common reading room focuses me wonderfully, my student discipline takes over and I write or read while I am there. The space is too public and too uncomfortable, but still just sufficiently safe and familiar that I stay alert, on track, but relaxed at the same time. The soft thread of careful feet trying not to disturb is endearing in it's civilised and polite concern for the work of others, and the scent of stacks of books carries the memory of more than 30 years of study and work. This is, as much as any place in the world, home.

And so it is with a familiar delight that I settle into the library at the University of Bologna. This is one of the oldest universities in the world, and it has the libraries to prove it. My main library is at the media and music department, where the tables for reading and working are scattered among the stacks. Saturday I was introduced to another library I am definitely going to be using - although I have to book a time to get the full use of it - the Renzo Renzi library and their wonderful videogame archive. Others have pointed to fantastic libraries - some so stunning that they have closed them to tourists, and I will have to prove my need in order to access them, such as the Archiginnasio library. As a visiting scholar I can probably get in there, but as a digital media scholar it may be a somewhat better use of my energy and connections to book time at the videogame archive.

What all these libraries have in common is a wonderful opportunity for access. They are, to me, the ultimate symbol of freedom and equality. They offer to all who are willing to respect the work and curiosity of others, the opportunity to learn, be entertained, discover, study, and enjoy, a vast body of literature, art, creativity and research, that covers centuries, and in some cases, millennia.

And this is the message of today. I am one month and 17 days, one article and one book chapter into my sabattical. It's spring in the world outside of these dusty rooms, and I walk to and from my beloved libraries under the beautiful porticos, sheltered by ancient, civilised laws protecting common rights and public spaces. If anybody ever make me choose between the bicycle lanes of Copenhagen or the porticos of Bologna, I am going to have to struggle with which to vote for, but right now it is colonnades all the way - literally.

Sunday, March 05, 2017

When people talk about academics, it's as if they speak of something belonging to another, walled-off world. To many, that is probably kind of true. If you don't make academe your career, you visit it, live in a very particular type of bubble where you cram your head with knowledge and experiences that change you more or less fundamentally, and then you move on to a community where the changes wrought on you are more random, less planned, less visible and less controlled. In their lives, being at a college or university is a limited, enclosed experience. "When I was a student," they may say. "At the university, these were the experiences..."

This sense of living a life apart from every other experience makes being an academic something romantic and nostalgic, even if you walk away from it with scorn. Perhaps it is even why so many walk away with scorn. In order to be able to distance yourself from a way of living which is so different, you need to start hating it a little, to convince yourself turning away was the right things. To explain why you didn't study more, or learn something else, you sneer at academic knowledge, and call it irrelevant. It might be to cover the secret desire for a Ph D and a lifetime of learning, why you left, why you failed. The reason isn't really important, the thing that is still with you is the sense of those who become academics as people who remain in the dream, who live a life apart, who do not touch reality. They are still in the ivory tower.

Sadly, there's not a lot of ivory in that tower. Most of the resources invested in Universities you have already seen. The auditoriums, the classrooms, the libraries - they are there for the students, like you were and like your children will be. The offices are crowded and the book collections you perhaps admire during supervision are collected over decades of work, one book at the time, not through some magic privilege. Imagine the money you spend on your favourite hobby (drinking and shopping counts). Then every time you spend 25€ on your hobby, you buy a book as well. That's where the books come from. Also, the students admiring those book collections will steal your books. I lose some every year to students who "forget" to give them back, believing that there must be some secret source of books where I can just go get a new one.

And that professor you just "borrowed" a book from isn't paid particularly well. It's not bad, being a tenured professor is in most places of the world one of those pretty safe middle-class jobs. But the realities of life are as real to scholars as to anybody else. So where, in all this, are the ivory towers?

Hidden in between the intense competition for work, the throat-cutting ambition that makes you mistrust old friends and new, the non-disclosure statements, the extreme work-hours and the nights of grading - somewhere in that world, there really ought to be a silver lining. The thing is - you need to be able to see it. It's not in the relaxed work hours, because any teaching scholar who also tries to research and publish will laugh until they cry at that idea. It's not in the respect and status - at the moment education and research is apparently the place where all governments agree they can spend less and cut more (and how ironic is that - the well-educated in power pulling the ladder up behind them, and the public cheering the decision, because teaching the young to question the status quo is ridiculous. After all this is currently the best of all possible worlds... OK, I will stop there, let's just say that you don't need to be a conspiracy nut to suspect that there is an agenda to the attacks on public education.)

It is something very small, a bit of wonder, a bit of desire, a bit of mystery. If you want to do well, over a long time, working long hours in a complex, often overwhelming job, you need to be intrinsically motivated. If not, the lack of funding, the constant care you need to offer students, the consistent self-examination and push for creative questions and new knowledge will break you. It happens. Scholars burn out, or decide to follow alternative tracks on a regular basis. They become administrators, advisors, consultants, or just pull back and into themselves, getting by with as little effort as possible.

And then you sit there, like I do right now, asking yourself - how did we get here? I was planning to write about the wonders of being a travelling scholar visiting the oldest University in Europe. About going from the shiny glass building of ITU to the solemn rows of colonnades connecting the buildings of the University of Bologna, but instead what I wrote about - what my fingers needed to work through - was academic over-work, loss, and exhaustion. But then there is that little bit of mystery.

It is what I am here to be reminded of. I am going away from everything that has made me feel like I have been mentally scraped clean, to rediscover the why of being a scholar. And I have come here, to the oldest well of knowledge I could reach, to recover. One month and three days in. Tomorrow I start writing a book. Today I eat "melanzane", read a new language, and walk the endless colonnades.

Saturday, March 04, 2017

I am going to give up counting working days vs just dates. It will get too tricky. I will however talk about where my mind goes in this period, because that's what a sabbatical is all about. I am doing this is order to let my mind go somewhere different.

First, it got all busy finishing an article on asynchronous play. Then, muddling around in that pit and fiddling with my NintendoDS, I realised that we are in the age of asynchronicity. We think we are talking about Instant communication, because it is so easily available to us. We can, if we want, be in immediate dialogue all over the planet, but we rarely use that. Instead we permit delays, from micro-delays of seconds (do I respond to that text? Do I really want to like that picture?) to delays of hours, days, months.

These delays can be used in different manners. We use them to think. What do I really mean, what might this response lead to, how is this interpreted? This is the rational use of the delays. But we live in a time of emotion, and the question is - what can these delays do to emotion?

Emotion in itself is interesting. The last decades have been spent going away from rationalism towards emotionalism. We are at a point in history where it is more important to feel right than to be right. If this sounds like I am on the side of the edgelords yelling "be rational" at the top of their all caps keystroke voices, then trust me, the self-righteous anger of the internet rationalists is no less emotional than the outraged middle-aged woman ranting about being downgraded on their flight.

What it looks like those pauses is being used for is to up the ante - to make it harder on those around us. It hardens the resolve of the persons in the conversation, adding support for their feelings, rather than allow for a cooling down period to let saner minds prevail. The delayed mind isn't necessarily saner, it is, if anything, more set in its ways.

Of course, I am not sure if this is true. Immediacy is clearly part of the emotional response, and time to think means time to chicken out. However, time to think also means time to justify, place blame, and confirm bias.

(This is as far as I got the day I wrote this. The rest is from much later. So much for frequent bloggposts.)

Another direction is followed by Norwegian Broadcasting is currently doing an intresting experiment though. Their tech-blog NRK beta has designed a little questionnaire of three questions which need to be answered correctly in order to be allowed to comment. The questions are taken from the article, and ensure that people have some understanding of it rather than just commenting based on the headline or even other comments. An important part of their experiment is to provide a "cooling off" period, to avoid a response in immediate affect.

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

This year I am experiencing one of those periods which make others so intensely envy scholars. I have almost a year away from what most people recognize as "work" - I am not teaching and not doing administration, two of the largest and most immediate tasks of a contemporary academic. However, at ITU we are supposed to do as much research as teaching, and more teaching and research than administration, so when I, like so many other academics, ignore research or do it on our spare time, we are actually ignoring our jobs - no matter if the jokes very often are on us when we try to create some room in our calendars.

The norwegian-language link states that the use of time has not changed in 12 years.

Which leads me to this sabbatical. Much as I am looking forwards to this year, and it will take me to exoticandwonderful places, it will be a year of intense work. To give you an idea about what kind of work a sabbatical may contain, here's my schedule for this year:

February: finishing an article for an anthology, sending one panel proposal, one paper and one extended abstract off to conference. Finishing one exam.
March, April, May: writing 4 chapters for a book. Also: two exams, one abstract for a conference, organizing one seminar, possibly going to one more conference, and making a camera-ready paper out of the work in February, if it's accepted.
June: Either writing a 70 page research proposal, or a 40 page research proposal.
July: Just kidding about the proposals. If I am doing the 70 page one, this month will not be the vacation month it is supposed to be, but instead one conference, and more work on that proposal. No way I can do that in just one month.
August: Two articles, because I really need to write out some of the stuff that has been accumulating on my to-do list.
September: Finishing one of the two proposals, and editing a special issue for a journal.
October, November: Finishing the book, and all other academic work I want to have published.
December: Rounding up, and starting to plan for the spring term, when I am back.

Looking at this, I want to go back to bed. If I manage to keep my own schedule successfully, 2018 is going to be a record production year (because none of this will actually be published in 2017), and if I just manage to do half of this, I'll still be producing more than I have in years.

Looking at this, I am sitting here with a huge grin. This is why I am a scholar. I now have a chance to do the work I am already doing in week-ends and evenings, all day and without interruptions. For this one year, I am at the far right in the figure above, while I am also in the middle figure, just with an even slimmer "teaching" part. The more than 100% research is pretty much true though.

And that is day three obligatory to-do list. Day one I went out and did something totally different, because the day before I had submitted another research proposal and my arms were hurting too much to touch a keyboard. Day two I cleaned my office of six months of intense teaching/exams/proposal writing stacked to about 130%. All in all, productive so far. Just 300+ days to go.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

I am currently reading Nick Sousanis beautiful book Unflattening, and while I am not done (the assumption that it goes beyond words really bugs me, and I will soon throw some Roland Barthes on the table next to it and write a review), I think it illustrates certain concepts beautifully. A main theme for the book is the importance of shifting your point of view, having new experiences and gaining the habit of variety.

At a very different point, redditor republicannarnia posted a link to a google document about the connection male privilege/white privilege. This is a nice composition about how a young woman realized that in order to understand her own white privilege, she needed to use lessons from feminism.

Both these points reflect the strategies of research promoted by the cultural studies tradition, called methods triangulation or multiplicity. The point there is that to understand what happens in society, you need to look at it from more than one perspective. You have to be willing to move your point of view.

What Sousanis offers which is interesting though, is a connection between specialisation and limited viewpoints. I think he may be on to something. We have tended to assume that the cause of fear of academia is caused by lack of education. However, when we find people with Ph Ds in physics systematically following and bashing pretty self-evident gender research material, it's clearly not more education that is the problem. Instead, I suspect that the problem is the endless turf wars of specialization, and the fear that comes with shifting your point of view. When we have invested 20 years of education in order to reach the point we are at, and somebody tells us we STILL don't get everything right, that is pretty terrifying. After all, each of us are balancing on the sharp edge of highly specialized knowledge, and it may feel like taking a step to the side in order to get a different perspective may just push us off.

I still don't have a solution. But I am spending what time I have between application writing these days thinking about ways to use methodologies to shift my perspective and unflatten what I am looking at. In between I read Unflattening slowly, allowing myself to be both annoyed and delighted, savouring both points of view.

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

It's the time of the year when we talk about how horrible the practice of expensive Christmas presents is, wail about the consumer society, and criticize the material pleasure of receiving a gift. I can't agree less. I love getting and giving presents, and the fact that some of my family have explicitly said they don't want presents makes me sad, over and over again, through the year.

First, I love giving gifts. When I am traveling or just walking around in stores, I often see something, remember a conversation with a person I love, and get it for them. They are close to my mind and heart, and if I see something I think will make them happy, I really want to contribute to that. This is of course limited by my wallet. I don't have unlimited funds, and I don't want to give gifts that make me angry or disappointed after giving them away and getting nothing in return. It has to be a gift I can easily give. Sometimes I knit, sometimes I buy, sometimes I go through my own stuff and hand on something I know will do better service with the other person. That's the way one of my fancier winter coats just left me - I used it very rarely, the person who got it was both delighted and in need of something warm and nice. When somebody doesn't want my gift, it feels like a rejection, one I am reminded of every time I see something I know they would love. I pick up a pin, a cap, a bottle of something nice, and I know the person I would get that for just doesn't want this, and I put it back.

Second, I love getting gifts. To that end I am pretty good at making my wishes clear to the ones I expect gifts from. But it doesn't matter if I wanted it or not. My mother would reliably give me cotton panties of the most sensible type imaginable, knitted socks, or occasionally a wool undershirt. When she was too sick to do her own shopping, she'd send me out with shopping lists of socks and shirts and mittens, and I'd pack up the many different objects for her to label, so I wouldn't know what was for me. In my whole life my parents gave me two special presents, the kind that made me feel like I had received something expensive and incredible. The first was a pair of red skis, when I was perhaps 6 or 7. No pair of skis since have been that nice. The second was a washing machine, just before my first child was born. We were extremely broke students washing everything at a fairly remote laundromat. My father would have none of that, so a washing machine I got. I really needed that thing, and it survived three moves. (It was however at the end replaced by the only machine to get her own name: "Bella", spoken with reverence through the 15 years she just kept doing what had to be done.) But I am quite aware that presents like those come only a few times in a lifetime. For the rest of the time it's all about thinking of each other. And if that thought happened to come in September, while there was a sale on sensible cotton underwear, so be it.

With our kids, we got into the habit of giving them items for their hobbies, sport and school for Christmas. That's when they got the special things that supported their activities. And then there were the books and games. Having a stack of books to read through Christmas has always been the very best gift of all. We all read fast, a lot and over a wide range of topics. When we're done with our own stack, it's time to raid that of the others...

Now that we all pretty much have our own incomes, what we give each other when we want to be really fancy are experiences. One year the grown up children gave us a dinner at a very special restaurant. That was a fantastic gift; a precious memory and a wonderful experience. We exchange tickets for shows, or pay each others' fees for streaming services. But we know that every present has been picked based on what we know of each other, and what we think about at a given moment. Even when we just give them money to shop for and the promise to go with them, or look after their children while they shop, it's a gift of consideration.

This is, of course, not a magical extravaganza of gifts, where we drown in the surplus. The only ones experiencing that are the grandchildren. But it's an exchange of tokens proving we have been thinking about each other. And the occasional stack of warm socks.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

The last few years I have been blogging less and less. One of the reasons is Facebook. Where this used to be the main outlet for sharing small and big things that happened in my more or less academic life, Facebook entered and changed the game. Another is time. I hardly have time to write articles and I write a lot more applications. This means that I am not writing stuff I feel I can freely share.

Next year is my sabbatical though. From February until December I will be traveling, writing and reading. While friends and family live in my apartment in Copenhagen, I will be in different places around the planet, visiting different universities, writing in new libraries, speaking to different peers. I will be writing half of a book, editing half of a special issue of a journal, and working on several old articles that have been begging to be written over the last few years. And while I do that, I will also be working on my popular academic reporting skills, which is where this blog comes in.

2017 will be the renewal year of this blog, I think. It will be about academic travels, about different cultures and structures, about being a visiting scholar, living with new languages, exploring foreign spaces. And at the end, I hope to have found or defined anew my own voice.

And yes, I am writing it here, because it is public - even if only I will ever notice that I wrote it here. It's a resolution for 2017, and I hope to be able to keep it.

Thursday, October 06, 2016

A lot of the links in this post are in Norwegian. I am still writing in English because this event is so similar to other, international events.

The digital space is a weird place, and when it starts to become a place for identity politics, it gets weirder. In Norway a group of men who just wanted a safe space for their stupid jokes and occasionally annoying sense of humour crossed the line. Their safe space was invaded by people who thought that this was a group for aggression against women, immigrants and children, and acted on that. One of the things they did was to attack a Norwegian blogger, known as Sophie Elise. She is a fashion blogger who has spent quite a lot on her looks, she likes make-up, she poses in bathing suits and shows off her tattoos.

For some reason, some of the members of "Mannegruppa Ottar" decided that writing harassing and hateful comments about her, including threats, belonged in a "closed" group of more than 30 000 random Norwegian men. (Mannegruppa Ottar means "Men's group Ottar" and refers to an infamous radical feminist group, which I assume represents their idea of the arch enemy.) But if we go with the "boys will be boys" school of thought, responding to them to tell them to stop being so mean ought to have been fairly unproblematic. It wasn't real, you know, just joking...

One of Sophie Elise's followers, a 13 year old girl, wrote what she felt about their harassment of one of her favourite bloggers. That was not acceptable, thought the group members. The minority that felt it was OK to be mean about women in this company immediately had a new target, and started describing what they wanted to do to a 13 year old girl - and it was NOT offering her a soda and some ice cream. The language was deliberately aggressive and upsetting, like the jokes about how to kill and rape babies, also a fun topic in this group.

As this became known the other members in the group that never did any of this, and who tried to speak up against it, wanted to do something about their image. Being a member of the group had turned them into outcasts, people were unfriending them, and they expressed distress about the posts and about how other viewed them. In order to try to fix their image they did as so many big businesses have done: they wanted to give money to charity, in this case to a group working to fight children's cancer. This was, to the sorrow of some of the men who had children with cancer, rejected. This is pretty much the same as happened to GG when they tried to buy forgiveness for their sins by donating to Ablegamers. Both the benefiting organizations are worthy causes - both refused because they didn't want to be used as pawns in an ongoing conflict.

Some, however, said "good riddance, now I know who hates freedom of speech." Well, no, not really. The activities they wanted to be allowed to keep on with included harassing women into silence, and with the help of the Norwegian police, they got one of their goals, as Sophie Elise removed the blogpost where she called them out. Using the well-known tactic of making threats until women are silenced isn't really free speech. It's a criminal offense. Because by Norwegian law, social media are not private communication if you have a certain number of followers - the limit is around 50. So a closed group of more than 30 000 people is clearly public, searchable mass-communication online.

I have to admit I am not fan of the more extreme fashion bloggers, but it's their choice how much they expose of their bodies, with or without silicone and photoshop. Also, I understand that men want to be allowed their space for bad jokes. I am a member of groups that post academic memes and groups with uplifting quotes to deal with chronic illness - I am not going to judge anybody for tasteless humour. But these are not jokes. What they are being criticized for goes beyond that. And it isn't like it is hard to understand these distinctions. It's not a matter of trying to decode subtle clues for political correctness, and finally finding a place where they don't have to guess what they did wrong now. This isn't making jokes about never being able to understand what your wife means when she says "fine".

The people I really don't understand are not the few who felt that it was fun to use this opportunity to be as offensive as possible. I have seen their language, their "humour" and their online nests. What I don't understand is how the ones who were offended, who tried to speak up against the worst offenses, could just keep being members. Is it so hard to find female-free jokes online that they have to suffer through a Facebook feed full of harassment, rape-threats, racism and homophobia to get to them? And how can they consider themselves victims? At this point, if they leave the group, people will forget about the membership in a couple of days, and they can leave the stigma of somebody unfriending them behind easily. The threats against Sophie Elise and the 13 year old girl may keep popping up in their feeds forever. In other cases we have seen that speaking out against harassment just makes it worse. And the more than 30 000 non-harassers of the group are hurt because they might be mistaken for somebody else, and unfriended?

If you happen to feel offended by such stigma, think really hard the next time you laugh at a joke about women, immigrants or homosexuals, and remember what it feels like to be included in a group others criticize, attack and make snap judgements about without checking if you are really one of those. Because not every woman who wears make-up is a fuckdoll, not every gay man is constantly cruising for anal sex, just like not every member of Mannegruppa Ottar agreed on the harassment and threats. If you want the respect to go both ways... then it has to go both ways.

PS: I have no idea if I know any members of this group, and I do not plan to find out. It's their business. But I monitor my comment field like always.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

September 9th 2016 the Aftenposten editor Espen Egil Hansen published a video addressing Mark Zuckerberg. In this video he explained why you can't treat all images the same. The picture he was talking about is the famous picture that quite possibly turned the flow of the coverage of the Vietnam war, the famous picture of a nine-year old girl running naked down a road, flanked by armed soldiers and with her back burned in a napalm attack. Author Tom Egeland had been publishing this image in connection to discussions on strong and shocking press photography. Facebook deleted his posts. Others posted it. It got deleted. Egeland posted it over and over again, and got denied from Facebook. A Norwegian expert on freedom of speech, Anine Kierulf, made a long post with several different nude images, some from art, some from pictures, and asked Facebook what was acceptable. The whole thing got deleted. The editor of Nettavisen, an online newspaper, wrote about the case on Facebook, and got denied. Why? It's a nude picture of a child, and as we know, Facebook really has problems with nudity. Ask any woman who has posted a picture of her own breasts, whether it is with a slightly erotic overtone, or if it is while breastfeeding or to discuss scars after breast surgery. Even the chest area of women with no breasts, where both have been removed in surgery, is too daring for Facebook.

Hansen's rant against Facebook caught the attention of several large newspapers. The Guardian wrote about it, Time Magazine wrote a piece and made a video about it, The Washington Post let us all know Facebook had changed their mind. It didn't hurt the cause that Facebook also deleted the post of Norway's Prime Minister Erna Solberg when she posted the picture.

This case is very interesting from several different angles. Questions kept popping up in my Facebook feed (very meta that). Is Facebook just a platform, or also a news provider, and as such, what kind of editorial responsibility does it have? At what point does a private platform turn into a public platform? Is Facebook now so big that Governments should look into how it practices freedom of speech, and should it be subject to the same kind of scrutiny and discussions about censorship and freedom of speech that nation states and national media are subject to? This example is a very good starting point for these discussions, and they will be revisited in media research for years to come.

Today's take on it from my side is however concerned with the importance of education: Cultural, historical, social. So far we have no algorithm that can recognize the kind of nuance needed to distinguish the picture of a woman bravely sharing her post-op scars from pornographic titillation. To a human being with the least sensitivity to images, context, stance and position, the difference will be very, very clear. And unless we accept that there is a difference, and this difference is important, we will never be able to develop better tools, nor to educate the humans who sit in key positions to do that kind of evaluations. The technology will keep being stupid, and our application of it will be even more so, to the point of being dangerously oppressive. Because oppression is what we get in a society that refuses to acknowledge nuance, context and shifting circumstances.

In short: this is why we need humanists and social scientists in tech-related work places, schools, education and research. Somebody needs to understand the difference between a revolutionary war photo and kiddie porn. It is, clearly, much harder than we thought.

Monday, August 08, 2016

Transmedial storytelling is the art of telling stories across multiple platforms. Henry Jenkins underlines how in order for this to be transmedial and not just a matter of remediation of a story, different parts of the story needs to be told in different media. This makes transmedial storytelling a kind of serial storytelling, but over several different platforms or modalities: print, film, games, voice, photo, painting, etc.

But transmedial storytelling is unlike serial storytelling in that it is not produced in a linear fashion. This means that we are not looking at a series where we see the story develop over time or with a simple causality. Transmediality often means that stories are linked into unity through perception rather than reseption. This means that logic and structure depends on the perceptions of the user/reader/viewer/ or what we prefer to call the people who enjoy making sense of often disjointed storylines. This links transmedial storytelling to non-linear or hypertextual storytelling. In the Wired article I linked to there, the author claims that hypertext fiction never took off. When we look at transmedial storytelling, we will see that this is spectacularly and increasingly wrong. The difference is that what we see today is not something as simple as a collection of links in a digital "choose your own adventure" book, but grand, complex and intricate stories developed over time and through the effort of a large amount of people.

In the course at ITU, we will look at how the computer offers us affordances that allows for a transmedial storytelling where we can all be part, in the role of our choice. We can be consumers and creators, critics, fans and helpers. We can play a vital role or create a derivative universe: but we can always choose how we want to be involved.

The main genre where we find transmedial storytelling actively used today is in Fantasy and Science Fiction. There may be many reasons for this, but I tend towards looking at the readers of these genres. They are often enthusiastic about technology, they are ready to be very engaged in the fictional worlds they follow, they form strong, tight fan networks, and they follow the fictional worlds they enjoy in any medium possible. And if they can't find anything new to feed their enthusiasm and interest, they create their own, through role-play, fan writing and other fan-based activities. This means that students of this topic at ITU may have to familiarise themselves with this genre. While it would be helpful to read some Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings or watch Star Wars, googling the different universes we will be talking about goes a long way. We will be looking at the Marvel Universe, at Game of Thrones, World of Warcraft and Lego, to mention some that will come up. If you want to understand, reading comics and watching animated series is great. However, you can easily follow this course without a deep understanding of this culture, as the Internet is a fantastic source of knowledge about both the formal productions and the fan practice in the many different cases that will be used.

But why do we spend so much time on these universes? Are they important? What is important in this case is the structure, the techniques and the forms, not necessarily the content. We see that journalists are increasingly under demand to produce transmedially, and there is no real model in place to help journalists remain critical and structured when print media fail. And while we may be nostalgic about print media, this situation will not be magically reversed. Instead we need to understand how the emerging structures of storytelling are built and maintained, what they do and how we can analyse and criticize them. The same goes for advertising that becomes integrated in the lives of the audience, using the audience to contruct their own parts of the advertising, such as with Intel and Toshiba's "The Beauty Inside" advertising (That blog has several other examples and interesting resources).

We want to be able to recognize and understand these structures, appreciate the labour put into their construction, and question constructively and critically the choices made by creators and participants. That is what the fall term will be about, and why we will be creating our own transmedial stories.

About Me

This is the journal of Torill Elvira Mortensen. I am an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. The topics of my writings here are among other things media studies, reader-response theory, role-play games, Internet Culture, travel, academic weirdness and online communication - put together at random.
Google scholar page.

Personal Publication and Public Attention, Torill Elvira Mortensen (2004): "Personal Publication and Public attention", in Gurak, Laura, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff and Jessica Reyman (ed): Into the Blogosphere; Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs, at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/, University of Minnesota.

Pleasures of the Player (pdf), Torill Elvira Mortensen (2003): Pleasures of the Player; Flow and control in online games, Doctoral Dissertation Volda College and University of Bergen.

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The Gamers' Space

The Gamers' Space is a small project I am doing in the spring 2009. It includes an electronic survey, pictures of game machines of different kinds, and interviews done at The Gathering, a large LAN party in Hamar, Norway. For participation, more information, links and addresses, check The Gamers' Space.